THIS SATURDAY at the Galway City Museum, renowned playwright and novelist John Arden will launch his new collection of short stories, Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession.
Over an afternoon chat at his home in St Bridget’s Place, Arden reflected on his career and discussed his latest collection. It seemed a fitting occasion on which to interview Arden. His 79th birthday was just a few days previously and October 22 was the 50th anniversary of the premiere of his best-known play, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance.
English playwright
The play is about a group of British soldiers returning from a colonial war who plan to bring a taste of the conflict to an English village in order “to work that guilt back to where it began”.
Its themes of dirty foreign wars remain as relevant as when Arden first wrote the piece, as he acknowledges; “It is still very topical. That first production at the Royal Court was very good but it didn’t go down very well with the critics, most of them didn’t like it at all. It was regarded as a cold rhetorical play with didactic overtones. It took a while for it to get going.”
Arden was part of the celebrated wave of writers nurtured by George Devine at the Court, along with John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Ann Jellicoe, and Edward Bond. What are his recollections of that period?
“Well they never quite gelled as a group of writers or directors,” he observes. “I didn’t know much about theatre then and George Devine did issue tickets to young writers to go to rehearsals and see other people’s plays being done and that was a great thing because you got some idea of how directors worked and how the theatre worked which was very helpful.
“George was very good talking about the theory of the theatre and ways in which it worked and different styles of production and its history and all that. I learned a lot from him. But it didn’t last very long; the whole problem was the Royal Court never had enough money for this kind of experimental activity; they didn’t have a proper endowment and were dependent on the goodwill of a board of businessmen.
“If George Devine didn’t get audiences in for his new plays they would be scanty with the money and he needed successes that would transfer to the West End which meant that the philosophy of the theatre as a home for new writers was rather diluted.”
By this time Arden had also met the Irish actress Margaretta D’Arcy with whom he would share a life-long professional and personal partnership.
“I met this extraordinary woman at a party who was the first person I’d ever met who worked professionally in the theatre,” he recalls. “I thought she was a very exciting person, lively and exciting and stimulating. We’ve collaborated off and on ever since we first got together. I consulted her on my early plays; while the first play with both our names on is The Happy Haven which we did in 1960.”
That first meeting with D’Arcy was in 1955 and the couple married two years later.
While plays like The Workhouse Donkey and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight were recognised as important works, they enjoyed little commercial success and the couple’s political activism also led to some infamous disputes with the theatrical establishment, notably when they picketed their own play Island of the Mighty at the RSC in 1972.
After that episode, Arden largely withdrew from mainstream theatre and he and D’Arcy worked almost entirely in Ireland or on Irish themes.
In Ireland
A play he remains especially fond of is The Non-Stop Connolly Show, an epic six-play cycle about James Connolly which he and D’Arcy staged over the Easter weekend of 1975 at Liberty Hall.
“We directed it ourselves though we had the assistance of a lot of other people such as Jim Sheridan.” Arden explains. “It was got together as a special event over Easter with the help of Des Geraghty, who is still busy with SIPTU, and Eamonn Smullen of Sinn Féin The Workers Party who has since died. They used their muscle with the establishment at Liberty Hall to let us do the play there, and the subject was appropriate of course. We did very well with that, it got big audiences.”
Arden is sometimes described as a “lost voice” of English theatre, and there are many who bemoan his long absence from the mainstream. Does he feel any personal sense of regret about the situation?
“Not really, because whatever I was doing I was doing something I wanted to do,” he replies. “I like telling stories and I don’t mind very much how I tell them. If I can’t do it comfortably in the professional theatre then we’ll do it ourselves and if that proves too difficult because of setting up the productions then I’ll work for radio – I’ve done a lot of radio plays, the last one was in 2007 for the BBC, so I’ve always been involved with drama rather than the theatre.”
Theatre remains a source of inspiration for Arden; many of the protagonists in the fiction he has been producing steadily since 1981 come from the world of theatre. These include a Roman-era actor’s agent in his debut novel Silence Among the Weapons, the Reformation playwright John Bale who became Bishop of Ossory is the main character of Bale’s Books, and the motley crew of theatre-types that make up the cast of Jack Juggler and the Emperor’s Whore.
“Theatre does remain a source of inspiration for me,” he agrees. “It’s all part of the atmosphere of entertainment and storytelling, and so forth, and communicating with the public whether that’s through the printed word or plays.”
Throughout the sixties Arden and D’Arcy often spent time in Ireland and they settled here in 1971. Did his move from England induce any personal sense of dislocation?
“Margaretta was brought up in Dublin so I wasn’t totally without a guide to Irish life,” he notes. “Then things started getting overheated politically and we found ourselves involved in various scenarios and that’s when I did feel a sense of displacement.
“All sorts of things began to affect me psychologically because there were things going on about the role of the British government and army in Northern Ireland and Bloody Sunday and all that and later the hunger strikes.
“I found myself viewing English activities from the viewpoint of someone living out here which is a different perspective, I could no longer experience British public life entirely as a native Englishman. I got a new slant on it altogether. I never entirely identified with Ireland, I always felt I was English. So I’ve been slightly between the two countries ever since.”
Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession
And so to Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession. Arden may be 79 but his stories, by turns dark and funny, are full of rambunctious energy and exude a delightful relish for language.
The book is in three sections with stories set in Galway, London, and Arden’s native Yorkshire. The title story is partly set in 17th century Galway and features the murderous Dr Azariah Brude and sees RTÉ’s Galway studio being beset by ghostly manifestations.
“I was thinking of Dr Mengele who experimented on children in Auschwitz and I decided to put him back in history and then in Galway because I live here and I wanted to make it a ghost story as well,” Arden explains. “Then there’s The Masque of Darkness which is about the Gunpowder Plot which has always fascinated me because of the nearness it came to Ben Jonson the playwright which is historically true.
Dreadfully Attended is about a young fellow who becomes a clergyman and ends up joining the Fenians; it’s a sort of odd one it’s a kind of melodrama but it grew on me as I worked it through. The Yorkshire stories, some are based on stories my father told me with variations, while the last three are all entirely made up.”
The collection vividly attests to Arden’s continuing vitality as a writer of imaginative force and distinctiveness. The book, which comes complete with a DVD documentary on Arden made by his son Finn, sells for €24.99 and can be ordered online at www.margarettadarcy.com/johnarden
Gallows and other tales of Suspicion and Obsession will be officially launched at the City Museum this Saturday at 3pm by The Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole. Arden’s paintings, inspired by themes and incidents from the stories will also be exhibited at the museum and prints of them will be available for €10.
Arden will also read from the collection over the next three Saturdays, at the museum, at 3pm.
